Saturday, 1 November 2014

Water colour splat cushions...

...DIY

I probably don't need to tell you that changing up your soft furnishings is one of the easiest and cheapest way to update the decor of any room in your home...New curtains, throws and cushions is a great way to change up your colour scheme without too much effort, and those finishing touches can really make a room come together!

But instead of searching for that perfect cushion in home ware stores, it is even cheaper to make your own cushion covers and simply recover the cushions you already have.

You can of course find some lovely fabrics and sew up some new ones to fit in with your decor, but by the time I came to putting these finishing details in my new look living room, money was too short, even for this...so I came up with another solution:

My old white linen tablecloths was obsolete since I got my new kitchen table (See my kitchen makeover here)...so I decided to re-purpose the material and make some new cushion covers out of them!

But I wanted to create some kind of pattern on the plain fabric, as I had been told off by little miss moo for "painting everything white" (...and my 5 year old did have a point: white walls and whitewashed floors: A little subtle colour injection was definitely needed). Previously I have made cushions with monochrome geometric patterns, which was nice, but this time I wanted a "splash of colour"....which gave me an idea...

Using Dylon fabric paints (that I already had), I decided to create a splattered pattern on the linen, much like in the Nostalgiecat logo...

I mixed up some colours I liked the look of,then watered down the fabric paints...

Then I simply splatted on the paint with some paint brushes...

I experimented with different methods of splashing on the paint....and had great fun doing it!

When I was satisfied that I had some interesting patterns on the fabrics, I left the paint to dry...this took a bit longer than when I usually use fabric paint because the paints were watered down and the splodges were quite wet.

I then ironed the painted fabric to set the paint. According to the instructions of the fabric paints I used, it is important to have a cloth(I used an old tea-towel) between the iron and the painted fabric.

I then sewed the pillowcases together ( I am a self-confessed sewing-phobe, and if you are too, you could always purchase some plain ready-made cushion covers, and splat these....but as this was all about using what I already had to save money, I grit my teeth and wrestled with the sewing machine whilst filling the air with explicits....good thing little miss moo was at school!! LOL)

....anyway...they turned out rather nice:

Don't you think?

The result is a rather abstract and subtle colour injection....

...in my otherwise new white interior living room!

And to think I didn't pay a penny for them, fills me with a good sense of achievement...and nobody will ever have the same ones....not even you, should you want to try this for yourself!!